The Logo of Calgary’s Outcast Brewing

Talking to all the new breweries opening up on the prairies, as I have been trying to do in recent weeks, I come across a lot of different start-up strategies and a variety of visions for the brewery. But when I spoke with Patrick Schnarr, I heard something I hadn’t heard before. Not only is his start-up plan unique for the prairies, his vision for the brewery is also charting a new path.

Schnarr, along with his wife Krysten, are Outcast Brewing (here are their other social media coordinates: Twitter:@outcast_brewing, Instagram: @outcastbrewing, and Facebook). They will be pouring their first beer in Calgary in the coming weeks. What is unusual is they are doing so without having a brewhouse.

For the moment, Schnarr will be contract brewing out of Cold Garden, another fledgling Calgary brewery (read my profile of them here). He purchased his own 15hl fermenter and will be brewing every second weekend on Cold Garden’s brewhouse. It is a temporary plan. “Whole point of contract brewing is to establish brand, build a track record with consumers,” says Schnarr. “I will do this for six months and then evaluate and move toward my own place. And if this flops I am not bankrupt and at least I tried.”

The longer plan is to open his own smaller-sized brewery with a taproom. the taproom is a central aspect of his business plan, and core to his vision of creating local connections. “It will be small and friendly,” he says. “Twenty to thirty seats, no TV, music really low. I love sitting down and having a beer face-to-face. I want to encourage people to do what they used to do. Forget their phones and do things together.” He plans on having a dart board, board games and other activities that encourage socializing. He doesn’t have a location for the taproom yet, but figures he will either put it in a section of the city under-served for craft beer or try to ensure it offers something other taprooms don’t have.

Schnarr comes to owning a brewery via an unusual route. A native of New Brunswick, he moved to Calgary nine years ago, basically on a whim. “In December of 2007 I was sitting in my house in Fredericton. A friend sent me a message, his roommate just did midnight move asked if I wanted to come visit for a while. I wasn’t doing anything at the time so I said yes. I just wanted to do something cool. I thought I would end up coming back in six months. That was 9 years ago.”

He got a job as a sales rep for Pepsi for a few years, but was laid off in 2013. Then he heard Big Rock was looking for a cellar worker and applied.  “I became enamoured with beer”. That is when he got into homebrewing, and in a fairly serious way. After a year or so at Big Rock he jumped over to do deliveries for Wild Rose, which also lasted for about a year. Now he is working at a flooring business while he builds his brewery dreams.

The other thing that stood out for me in Schnarr’s initials is his choice of opening beer. “At first we will only have one beer, a Double IPA,” he notes. “No one is doing a year-round DIPA. We are going to build our brand on the DIPA.” He will supplement the signature beer with seasonals “every second month”. He is thinking of an Imperial Stout for a Christmas seasonal.

Schnarr knows going with a big, bitter Double IPA is a challenging move. “They are  not something everyone wants,” he admits. “But I want my own spin on brewing, what I like to drink. I can take risks that bigger breweries can’t.” He notes the single beer is just the starting plan and once the tap room is up and running he will expand to a full line-up of beer.

The flagship beer is called Make That a Double IPA and will be dosed with healthy amounts of Galaxy and Columbus. Schnarr wants his beer names to have some creativity to them. “I want clever, funny names that will start conversations. I want customers to ask why is the beer called that? What was my inspiration for that beer? Then I can sit down and talk with customers for a while and make them feel a part of it.”

As for the brewery name, Schnarr feels it reflects his experiences as well as his brewing philosophy. “It is about the person who never found his place in the industry, and is sailing off in the distance, charting his own course.” The reference to sailing, and the brewery’s sailboat logo, might seem unusual for a landlocked Calgary brewery. But Schnarr feels it links him back to home. “I wanted to incorporate where I came from.”

What does Schnarr think about opening his small operation at a time when dozens of new breweries are opening up in Calgary?  “It is awesome, great to see all these guys opening,” he answers. “It is really cool. we are developing a beer region.”

And he doesn’t worry about the competition this growth might bring. “My beer will be quite different than everyone else’s. People won’t drink four pints of it, but being a new entry it will come off really well,” he says. “Plus, I don’t need to sell a lot of beer at this point.”

In more ways than one when Schnarr says ” I am putting myself out there and focussing on my differentiation”, he means it in more ways than one.